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st_aurafinaTitle: Blueshift
Fandom: Doctor Who/Star Trek: Discovery
Rating: Teen
Words: 3306
Characters/Pairings: Thirteenth Doctor, prime!Philippa Georgiou, Michael Burnham
Warnings/Content: Crossover, Time travel to save a friend or loved one, Multiple Travelers - Character Realizes They're Not the Only Time Traveler Present, TARDIS Architecture, Klingon Weaponary, Conversations about Time Travel
Notes: Written for![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
kira_katrine in Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2019
Summary: On the point of death, Philippa is gathered up by a red angel, then rescued by a woman in a blue box.
Also at the Archive
There was so much to keep track of in a fight: Michael's location, the blaster, the edge of the blade in front of her. Philippa balanced it in her mind as she'd been trained, visualising herself as the centre of a solar system, surrounded by objects in orbit, all in predictable paths.
She was tiring, though, and worried about Michael, worried about the decisions they'd both made, worried about the pathways they'd chosen. Michael's choices had been regrettable. Well. Great officers do not become so without taking steps they later regretted, and Philippa knew that from personal experience. She sidestepped the fall of the Klingon's blade, caught him in the knee with a very satisfying crunch. The thing that worried her at this moment was that Michael would dwell on the potential consequences of her actions, far beyond what was necessary. There was nobody harder on Michael Burnham than Michael herself.
T'Kuvma caught her arm, twisted it at an unfortunate angle, and Philippa heard bone and sinew bend and snap. The pain was blinding, but she kept her awareness open, kept all the elements moving in her mind: Michael scrabbling for the blaster, the pale Klingon motionless on the floor, and T'Kuvma's knife moving downwards towards her chest. Ah.
Philippa wondered at how slowly the Klingon's blade moved. Surely she should be able to deflect it, or dodge, or repel the blow? Then she heard the slow clench of her own heartbeat, felt the breath rasping in her throat as she drew in a breath, and realised that it was only her perception of time that had changed.
The actual strike was surprisingly fast. Her breath pushed out of her with the impact, and she tasted blood in her throat, smelled it on her breath. She thought of Michael, of the Shenzhou and her crew, and hoped for them to survive. Her breath would not come, and her vision began to cloud. She remembered the sharp sting of scalding tea, the pleasant tannic bitterness making her tongue feel dry, the smoothness of the hot cup against her fingertips. Not such a bad memory, for one's last, she thought, and readied herself for the darkness.
The angel was a great surprise. It was red, and though Philippa's knowledge of this particular aspect of Christianity was limited, she was fairly certain white was the correct colour. The angel had an oval face, smooth and expressionless, terrifying in its inhumanity.
"What…" Philippa could only shape the word with her mouth; she had no air left to speak. Behind the angel, T'Kuvma seemed frozen, his lips still drawn back in a victory howl.
The angel pressed a seal around the knife in Philippa's chest, and put a hypospray to her neck with a hiss. Metallic fingers cupped Philippa's cheek briefly, a strange and intimate gesture, then slipped a mask over her mouth and nose. What was happening? The pain eased and she drew a small, glorious breath, though not enough to protest as the angel scooped her up. It spread its wings, and leapt into a blurred nothingness that was profoundly, appallingly wrong. Philippa was a Starfleet Captain. She knew space. This was not space. This was… this was void.
She woke with a jolt to a terrible scream, a sound she recognised as tortured metal. The red angel was stretched long against the empty nothing of the void, and the vivid colour was somehow faint, as if the substance of the angel had been smudged by a giant hand. Philippa felt that great hand too, dragging at each atom in her body, tearing and shaking her apart. To distract herself from the pain, she focused on the angel's glossy face. It was conscious, she was certain, and there was familiarity in that posture. It was an absurd thought, as the universe ground them both down to sub-atomic particles. Philippa would laugh, except that she had enough understanding to realise that this angel stood between her and death, and the angel was now breaking into pieces.
The scream of metal was overwhelmed by a second sound, a grinding, groaning rasp that Philippa could not recognise. It wasn't the sound of the angel being stretched like a toy, until joints popped and panels broke. Panels? No angels had panels, she realised.
"Oh, you're in a suit," Philippa said, gazing up what she now recognised as the smooth glass of a faceplate. "An exo-suit." Whatever was in the hypospray had forced the pain down, and while she couldn't breathe, exactly, she could form words. "I don't believe your suit is operating correctly."
"I'll say it's not," came a woman's voice from behind her. "You amateurs are stuck in the mud. Let me rephrase that: if the fabric of time and space were mud, you'd be axle-deep right now. If you had axles. Actually, I might just rethink that whole analogy. Shall I come in again?"
Philippa turned to see this new speaker, and the wound in her chest awoke with a burn. The hypospray was obviously wearing off, because Philippa was hallucinating. There was no other explanation for the blue cabinet, or the woman that stood beside it, just floating there in the void. Philippa's confused mind struggled to understand, but the adrenaline in her body was fading, and she lost her fight for consciousness. The last thing she heard was Michael's voice, hoarse and afraid.
"Save her."
The next thing she knew, Philippa was lying in a bed, a real bed, not a bunk or a medbay, but a mattress with sheets and overly firm pillows in cotton cases. The air smelled of wood polish and ozone, as well as clean laundry hung to dry over cut grass. She swallowed, dry-mouthed, and blinked to clear her eyes.
"Michael…" Her voice was barely audible, even inside her head.
"You're awake! I'll bet you feel like all your hangovers have come at once. Michael is your friend in the exo-suit? She should have made a safe landing by now. Somewhere and somewhen." It was the strange woman's voice. Philippa especially remembered the relentlessly cheery tone. She saw a blurred figure move in front of her, holding out a glass. "Here, this will help."
Philippa's arm moved far too slowly for her liking, and her muscles were stiff and creaky. She took the glass, which was beaded with condensation, slippery under her palm. "What is it?" she croaked.
The mattress dipped with the weight of a human body as the blurry figure sat on the end of the bed. "Just water," the woman said. "Good old aitch two oh."
A careful sip told Philippa it was indeed water, and suddenly she couldn't get enough of the stuff, cool and delicious on her tongue. She gasped with relief and almost miss-swallowed, sputtering to stop from choking.
The woman reached out to take the glass before it slipped from Philippa's fingers. "Easy does it."
Philippa opened her mouth to ask what was going on, and the woman held up a hand to stop her.
"Let me save you the effort till you find your strength: I'm the Doctor, this is my ship, you're well and alive. Your friend is safe, though we need to talk about that suit. It's a problem." Her accent was old British, Philippa recognised, though she'd never met anyone who spoke that way: all glottal stops and swallowed vowels.
Philippa struggled to sit, and the Doctor helped her upright. Her hands were very warm, well above human core temperature. "I'm guessing you're not the sort to stay put until you're well enough to get up properly."
"Your guess is correct," Philippa said, and her voice sounded less like it had been dragged up from the bottom of a dry well. She blinked her eyes, tried to clear the grit and blurriness, and the woman came into focus, as did the rest of the room. The Doctor's smile was broad and warm, though her gaze was unsettling: old eyes in a young face.
The room was also strange and unsettling. Philippa was accustomed to Starfleet austerity and found it soothing, despite the privilege of captaincy allowing for the accumulation of certain keepsakes. This space was cluttered with knick-knacks and half-assembled pieces of ancient electronics. She saw a pair of skis leaning nonchalantly against a wall, a wilting bouquet of small pink and yellow flowers in a glass tumbler, different to the one that she'd been drinking from a moment ago. She was fairly sure that was a cricket stump propping up one corner of the table the flowers sat upon. It was a very strange room.
It was also very obviously a room and not a cabin, not even a cabin on a civilian ship, where space was grudgingly given for personal living quarters and it showed, no matter how many curtains you hung or vines you cultivated over the utilitarian walls. This was a room, like a room in a house. It had wallpaper and ceiling cornices. It even had a window, though the drapes were pulled closed. Philippa had the strangest feeling that if she drew those curtains aside, she'd see a landscape of some sort.
"Is this your room?" she asked. "What kind of ship is this?" She folded the blankets back with careful precision and eased her legs around. She was wearing linen pyjamas, deep blue and soft from use. On her feet were rainbow striped socks, in colours so bright they hurt her eyes.
The Doctor helped her stand. "Not my room in particular. Not anybody's room at the moment, actually. I can't remember whose it was originally." She looked up at the ceiling as if the answer were there. "Turlough? Not Zoe or Tegan or Nyssa. Not Ace, definitely. Hm. It's a puzzle."
"You said my friend was in a time-suit?" Philippa schooled her expression and her voice to remain calm and politely inquisitive, though she desperately wanted answers to so many questions: what happened? Was Michael safe? Was that even Michael in the angel suit? Her ship, her crew, the Klingons, what was happening to them right now? Was the Federation teetering on the brink of war?
"Well, that's a lot of worries pouring out of your mind," the Doctor said. She took Philippa's hands. "You're not the first person to go through this. I know it's disorienting. The best advice I can give you is to give it a bit of time. Find your sea legs a bit first before you start trying to solve all the problems in the universe."
"Sea legs? I'm a Starfleet Captain!" Philippa was losing her temper, she could feel it going, and the frustration of it simply loosened her control. "I need to return to the Shenzhou, now."
The Doctor's guarded expression told her what she wanted to know: that this posed more of a problem than the woman was willing to admit.
"You really don't like to give out bad news, do you?" Philippa said. Her rage, brief and fiery, dissipated as she considered her options and what to do next. Intel. Intel was the highest priority.
"Well," said the Doctor. "It's not all bad news. You're alive, after all. Your friend is too, though surprised any of us made it out of that mire, with the mess her suit did to the space-time continuum. I know you humans are slap-dash about time-travel in the early days, but that suit was beyond the pale."
Philippa cocked an eyebrow at the patronising tone of 'You humans' but filed it away for later. There was no need to antagonise the Doctor when they were starting to reach some sort of concord. Instead, she pulled the striped socks off, and put her bare feet tentatively down on the parquetry floor.
There was no movement through the wood panels, no pulse of warp engines. There was something familiar there though – an energy? a resonance? – and she concentrated on that as she took unsteady steps forward. By the time she reached the door, she identified the sensation as an awareness of music playing in another room. She stopped, barely touching the brass handle, then glanced over her shoulder at the Doctor.
"Is your ship singing?" she asked.
The Doctor smiled, an entirely sincere expression that lit up her face. "Ah, you've got a good ear for a ship if you can hear that." She leaned against the wall, spread her fingers wide, and sighed. "Yes, that's my girl, that's my TARDIS," she said.
Philippa couldn't help but smile too. She knew that feeling, that sense of love and belonging, of connection to your ship. It gave her hope, that this commonality would enable her to convince the Doctor to help her return to her crew, and to help Michael.
Through the door, Philippa saw a hallway, long and cavernous, with a floor made of some solid crystal that glowed gently with a golden light. The singing was still apparent, and it tingled the soles of her feet as she walked. The Doctor followed beside her, hands shoved deep in her pockets, as if this were nothing more than a pleasant stroll.
"Your ship is beautiful," Philippa said, and she meant it. There was warmth radiating from the walls, and the atmosphere was electric, as if the particles that constitute space and time were gently vibrating as the ship – this TARDIS – moved between them.
"Flattery will get you everywhere," said the Doctor. "Almost everywhere."
"My ship is the USS Shenzhou," she said. "Do you know it?" Beneath her feet, the light shifted and glimmered, throwing tiny rainbows against the grey slate walls.
The Doctor trailed her fingers along the grey slate walls as they walked. "Not specifically. One of those huge Federation vessels, I'm guessing? The twenty third century is full of them," she said, as if talking about exotic birds at a holiday destination.
The keepsakes and trinkets continued, but were kept more tidily here. Each was hung on the walls, labelled with hand-written tags, and lit from behind, as in a museum.
Sycorax Whip, one tag read. Another unnecessarily identified a plastic daffodil as just that: Plastic Daffodil. Philippa was taking in the enamelled detail on an Egyptian-styled death mask when she glimpsed the Klingon dagger and immediately stumbled, startled by her visceral reaction to the gleaming blade.
The Doctor caught her elbow and stopped her from slamming face-first into the quartz floor. "Oops," she said. "Mind where you step."
"What is the meaning of this?" Philippa gasped as she struggled for balance. The dagger was horribly familiar, right down to the clan's seal on the hilt. She had been given the closest possible chance to examine it while it was buried in her chest. Now it had been hung on the wall like a valued relic, labelled with its own tag on a red thread. In blue ink and neat capitals was written Klingon Mek'leth. Dizzily, Philippa filed the name away as she stared at the thing that had been hilt-deep in her chest.
The Doctor's strong arm was the only thing holding her upright now. Philippa leaned into the contact, seeking the warmth of another body while her own went into a tailspin of panic, and found the Doctor radiated heat right through her clothes. She sagged into the Doctor's arm, waiting for her heartbeat to calm, for her breathing to settle. She was alive, she told herself. She was here and present and alive. The knife was just a knife.
"Now that was just rude," the Doctor was saying, apparently to mid-air. "I know you had to work hard to get us out of that distortion, and yes, we're both very appreciative, but there's no need to make pointed statements about our guests, is there?" She turned to Philippa. "I'm sorry," she said. "The thing is, the TARDIS, she has this idea she's in charge of things. It's possible she's a teeny bit challenged by your… your captainyness."
"That is absurd," Philippa said.
The Doctor shrugged. "Absurdity is all part of the time and space experience, I'm afraid." They started walking again, and around the next corner, came across a low bench with a padded velvet seat.
"That's more like it," the Doctor said, approvingly, and helped Philippa to sit.
"Is that what my first officer is learning?" asked Philippa. "Absurdity?" Travelling through time in an armoured suit was, in itself, an absurd concept, but there were rumours. Starfleet was always dipping its toe into unorthodox propulsion methods, and she'd heard that the Klingons had certain methods of bending time.
"I've seen stranger methods of transport, but that was one of the more precarious," said the Doctor. "She must care about you very much, to have taken so many risks to sweep you away. It's smart, too: removing someone from the timestream at the point of death means that there's less distortion overall. Your personal timeline ended there."
Philippa sat with that fact for a few moments, letting the concept sink in. "When you say that my personal timeline ended there," she started, trying to find a polite way to ask if she was technically dead.
"Ah," said the Doctor, obviously realising the emotional impact of her words. "I always mean to explain that better, but honestly I'm not sure there's an easy way to say it."
"You were just having too much fun being clever and showing off your trinkets," Philippa snapped. She was exhausted, and the idea that she was also dead was proving very difficult to assimilate.
The Doctor rubbed a hand over Philippa's back, a point of warmth on her chilled skin. "Oh, Captain Georgiou, forgive me. I spoke without thinking. I get carried away sometimes, meeting new people, or seeing what new trick humans have taught themselves. I love you dearly, you know. Humans, I mean. I'm just not very good at telling the difference between facts that are interesting and facts that shatter. It's the same thing sometimes, and sometimes not."
"I need you to tell me now, Doctor: can I return to my time, to my ship?" It didn't matter: Philippa no longer had the patience or energy for having the truth delivered gently and in small mouthfuls.
The Doctor leaned her elbows on her knees, and her hair hung down around her face. It was evidently easier to deliver the difficult truths without making eye contact. "That seems unlikely, I'm afraid."
That settled it for Philippa. If she could not return to the Shenzhou, then she would move forward, to wherever Michael had landed. It only made sense that Michael had done something incredible and dangerous in order to save Philippa, of course she had. The fallout from such an action would be intense, and Michael would need a friend at her side.
She sat up straighter. "If I can't go back, then can I go forward? To where Michael is now?"
"Now that, I can do," said the Doctor, more cheerfully. "At least to the correct time period. It might not be the correct position in space, but it's a start."
Philippa stood up carefully, wary of dizziness or pain, then slowly straightened her spine. "Then if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to see how this ship is driven."
The Doctor laughed. "Sometimes I'm not sure who drives who: me or the TARDIS. Let's see what she's got in mind for us, shall we?"
Before she turned to follow the Doctor to whichever wondrous room served as the bridge aboard this TARDIS, Philippa reached around the corner to where the Klingon dagger was hung on the wall. She lifted it carefully from the bracket, and tucked it under her arm. Wherever she was going, she would need to be prepared. Michael Burnham was not the kind to land somewhere safe.
Fandom: Doctor Who/Star Trek: Discovery
Rating: Teen
Words: 3306
Characters/Pairings: Thirteenth Doctor, prime!Philippa Georgiou, Michael Burnham
Warnings/Content: Crossover, Time travel to save a friend or loved one, Multiple Travelers - Character Realizes They're Not the Only Time Traveler Present, TARDIS Architecture, Klingon Weaponary, Conversations about Time Travel
Notes: Written for
Summary: On the point of death, Philippa is gathered up by a red angel, then rescued by a woman in a blue box.
Also at the Archive
There was so much to keep track of in a fight: Michael's location, the blaster, the edge of the blade in front of her. Philippa balanced it in her mind as she'd been trained, visualising herself as the centre of a solar system, surrounded by objects in orbit, all in predictable paths.
She was tiring, though, and worried about Michael, worried about the decisions they'd both made, worried about the pathways they'd chosen. Michael's choices had been regrettable. Well. Great officers do not become so without taking steps they later regretted, and Philippa knew that from personal experience. She sidestepped the fall of the Klingon's blade, caught him in the knee with a very satisfying crunch. The thing that worried her at this moment was that Michael would dwell on the potential consequences of her actions, far beyond what was necessary. There was nobody harder on Michael Burnham than Michael herself.
T'Kuvma caught her arm, twisted it at an unfortunate angle, and Philippa heard bone and sinew bend and snap. The pain was blinding, but she kept her awareness open, kept all the elements moving in her mind: Michael scrabbling for the blaster, the pale Klingon motionless on the floor, and T'Kuvma's knife moving downwards towards her chest. Ah.
Philippa wondered at how slowly the Klingon's blade moved. Surely she should be able to deflect it, or dodge, or repel the blow? Then she heard the slow clench of her own heartbeat, felt the breath rasping in her throat as she drew in a breath, and realised that it was only her perception of time that had changed.
The actual strike was surprisingly fast. Her breath pushed out of her with the impact, and she tasted blood in her throat, smelled it on her breath. She thought of Michael, of the Shenzhou and her crew, and hoped for them to survive. Her breath would not come, and her vision began to cloud. She remembered the sharp sting of scalding tea, the pleasant tannic bitterness making her tongue feel dry, the smoothness of the hot cup against her fingertips. Not such a bad memory, for one's last, she thought, and readied herself for the darkness.
The angel was a great surprise. It was red, and though Philippa's knowledge of this particular aspect of Christianity was limited, she was fairly certain white was the correct colour. The angel had an oval face, smooth and expressionless, terrifying in its inhumanity.
"What…" Philippa could only shape the word with her mouth; she had no air left to speak. Behind the angel, T'Kuvma seemed frozen, his lips still drawn back in a victory howl.
The angel pressed a seal around the knife in Philippa's chest, and put a hypospray to her neck with a hiss. Metallic fingers cupped Philippa's cheek briefly, a strange and intimate gesture, then slipped a mask over her mouth and nose. What was happening? The pain eased and she drew a small, glorious breath, though not enough to protest as the angel scooped her up. It spread its wings, and leapt into a blurred nothingness that was profoundly, appallingly wrong. Philippa was a Starfleet Captain. She knew space. This was not space. This was… this was void.
She woke with a jolt to a terrible scream, a sound she recognised as tortured metal. The red angel was stretched long against the empty nothing of the void, and the vivid colour was somehow faint, as if the substance of the angel had been smudged by a giant hand. Philippa felt that great hand too, dragging at each atom in her body, tearing and shaking her apart. To distract herself from the pain, she focused on the angel's glossy face. It was conscious, she was certain, and there was familiarity in that posture. It was an absurd thought, as the universe ground them both down to sub-atomic particles. Philippa would laugh, except that she had enough understanding to realise that this angel stood between her and death, and the angel was now breaking into pieces.
The scream of metal was overwhelmed by a second sound, a grinding, groaning rasp that Philippa could not recognise. It wasn't the sound of the angel being stretched like a toy, until joints popped and panels broke. Panels? No angels had panels, she realised.
"Oh, you're in a suit," Philippa said, gazing up what she now recognised as the smooth glass of a faceplate. "An exo-suit." Whatever was in the hypospray had forced the pain down, and while she couldn't breathe, exactly, she could form words. "I don't believe your suit is operating correctly."
"I'll say it's not," came a woman's voice from behind her. "You amateurs are stuck in the mud. Let me rephrase that: if the fabric of time and space were mud, you'd be axle-deep right now. If you had axles. Actually, I might just rethink that whole analogy. Shall I come in again?"
Philippa turned to see this new speaker, and the wound in her chest awoke with a burn. The hypospray was obviously wearing off, because Philippa was hallucinating. There was no other explanation for the blue cabinet, or the woman that stood beside it, just floating there in the void. Philippa's confused mind struggled to understand, but the adrenaline in her body was fading, and she lost her fight for consciousness. The last thing she heard was Michael's voice, hoarse and afraid.
"Save her."
The next thing she knew, Philippa was lying in a bed, a real bed, not a bunk or a medbay, but a mattress with sheets and overly firm pillows in cotton cases. The air smelled of wood polish and ozone, as well as clean laundry hung to dry over cut grass. She swallowed, dry-mouthed, and blinked to clear her eyes.
"Michael…" Her voice was barely audible, even inside her head.
"You're awake! I'll bet you feel like all your hangovers have come at once. Michael is your friend in the exo-suit? She should have made a safe landing by now. Somewhere and somewhen." It was the strange woman's voice. Philippa especially remembered the relentlessly cheery tone. She saw a blurred figure move in front of her, holding out a glass. "Here, this will help."
Philippa's arm moved far too slowly for her liking, and her muscles were stiff and creaky. She took the glass, which was beaded with condensation, slippery under her palm. "What is it?" she croaked.
The mattress dipped with the weight of a human body as the blurry figure sat on the end of the bed. "Just water," the woman said. "Good old aitch two oh."
A careful sip told Philippa it was indeed water, and suddenly she couldn't get enough of the stuff, cool and delicious on her tongue. She gasped with relief and almost miss-swallowed, sputtering to stop from choking.
The woman reached out to take the glass before it slipped from Philippa's fingers. "Easy does it."
Philippa opened her mouth to ask what was going on, and the woman held up a hand to stop her.
"Let me save you the effort till you find your strength: I'm the Doctor, this is my ship, you're well and alive. Your friend is safe, though we need to talk about that suit. It's a problem." Her accent was old British, Philippa recognised, though she'd never met anyone who spoke that way: all glottal stops and swallowed vowels.
Philippa struggled to sit, and the Doctor helped her upright. Her hands were very warm, well above human core temperature. "I'm guessing you're not the sort to stay put until you're well enough to get up properly."
"Your guess is correct," Philippa said, and her voice sounded less like it had been dragged up from the bottom of a dry well. She blinked her eyes, tried to clear the grit and blurriness, and the woman came into focus, as did the rest of the room. The Doctor's smile was broad and warm, though her gaze was unsettling: old eyes in a young face.
The room was also strange and unsettling. Philippa was accustomed to Starfleet austerity and found it soothing, despite the privilege of captaincy allowing for the accumulation of certain keepsakes. This space was cluttered with knick-knacks and half-assembled pieces of ancient electronics. She saw a pair of skis leaning nonchalantly against a wall, a wilting bouquet of small pink and yellow flowers in a glass tumbler, different to the one that she'd been drinking from a moment ago. She was fairly sure that was a cricket stump propping up one corner of the table the flowers sat upon. It was a very strange room.
It was also very obviously a room and not a cabin, not even a cabin on a civilian ship, where space was grudgingly given for personal living quarters and it showed, no matter how many curtains you hung or vines you cultivated over the utilitarian walls. This was a room, like a room in a house. It had wallpaper and ceiling cornices. It even had a window, though the drapes were pulled closed. Philippa had the strangest feeling that if she drew those curtains aside, she'd see a landscape of some sort.
"Is this your room?" she asked. "What kind of ship is this?" She folded the blankets back with careful precision and eased her legs around. She was wearing linen pyjamas, deep blue and soft from use. On her feet were rainbow striped socks, in colours so bright they hurt her eyes.
The Doctor helped her stand. "Not my room in particular. Not anybody's room at the moment, actually. I can't remember whose it was originally." She looked up at the ceiling as if the answer were there. "Turlough? Not Zoe or Tegan or Nyssa. Not Ace, definitely. Hm. It's a puzzle."
"You said my friend was in a time-suit?" Philippa schooled her expression and her voice to remain calm and politely inquisitive, though she desperately wanted answers to so many questions: what happened? Was Michael safe? Was that even Michael in the angel suit? Her ship, her crew, the Klingons, what was happening to them right now? Was the Federation teetering on the brink of war?
"Well, that's a lot of worries pouring out of your mind," the Doctor said. She took Philippa's hands. "You're not the first person to go through this. I know it's disorienting. The best advice I can give you is to give it a bit of time. Find your sea legs a bit first before you start trying to solve all the problems in the universe."
"Sea legs? I'm a Starfleet Captain!" Philippa was losing her temper, she could feel it going, and the frustration of it simply loosened her control. "I need to return to the Shenzhou, now."
The Doctor's guarded expression told her what she wanted to know: that this posed more of a problem than the woman was willing to admit.
"You really don't like to give out bad news, do you?" Philippa said. Her rage, brief and fiery, dissipated as she considered her options and what to do next. Intel. Intel was the highest priority.
"Well," said the Doctor. "It's not all bad news. You're alive, after all. Your friend is too, though surprised any of us made it out of that mire, with the mess her suit did to the space-time continuum. I know you humans are slap-dash about time-travel in the early days, but that suit was beyond the pale."
Philippa cocked an eyebrow at the patronising tone of 'You humans' but filed it away for later. There was no need to antagonise the Doctor when they were starting to reach some sort of concord. Instead, she pulled the striped socks off, and put her bare feet tentatively down on the parquetry floor.
There was no movement through the wood panels, no pulse of warp engines. There was something familiar there though – an energy? a resonance? – and she concentrated on that as she took unsteady steps forward. By the time she reached the door, she identified the sensation as an awareness of music playing in another room. She stopped, barely touching the brass handle, then glanced over her shoulder at the Doctor.
"Is your ship singing?" she asked.
The Doctor smiled, an entirely sincere expression that lit up her face. "Ah, you've got a good ear for a ship if you can hear that." She leaned against the wall, spread her fingers wide, and sighed. "Yes, that's my girl, that's my TARDIS," she said.
Philippa couldn't help but smile too. She knew that feeling, that sense of love and belonging, of connection to your ship. It gave her hope, that this commonality would enable her to convince the Doctor to help her return to her crew, and to help Michael.
Through the door, Philippa saw a hallway, long and cavernous, with a floor made of some solid crystal that glowed gently with a golden light. The singing was still apparent, and it tingled the soles of her feet as she walked. The Doctor followed beside her, hands shoved deep in her pockets, as if this were nothing more than a pleasant stroll.
"Your ship is beautiful," Philippa said, and she meant it. There was warmth radiating from the walls, and the atmosphere was electric, as if the particles that constitute space and time were gently vibrating as the ship – this TARDIS – moved between them.
"Flattery will get you everywhere," said the Doctor. "Almost everywhere."
"My ship is the USS Shenzhou," she said. "Do you know it?" Beneath her feet, the light shifted and glimmered, throwing tiny rainbows against the grey slate walls.
The Doctor trailed her fingers along the grey slate walls as they walked. "Not specifically. One of those huge Federation vessels, I'm guessing? The twenty third century is full of them," she said, as if talking about exotic birds at a holiday destination.
The keepsakes and trinkets continued, but were kept more tidily here. Each was hung on the walls, labelled with hand-written tags, and lit from behind, as in a museum.
Sycorax Whip, one tag read. Another unnecessarily identified a plastic daffodil as just that: Plastic Daffodil. Philippa was taking in the enamelled detail on an Egyptian-styled death mask when she glimpsed the Klingon dagger and immediately stumbled, startled by her visceral reaction to the gleaming blade.
The Doctor caught her elbow and stopped her from slamming face-first into the quartz floor. "Oops," she said. "Mind where you step."
"What is the meaning of this?" Philippa gasped as she struggled for balance. The dagger was horribly familiar, right down to the clan's seal on the hilt. She had been given the closest possible chance to examine it while it was buried in her chest. Now it had been hung on the wall like a valued relic, labelled with its own tag on a red thread. In blue ink and neat capitals was written Klingon Mek'leth. Dizzily, Philippa filed the name away as she stared at the thing that had been hilt-deep in her chest.
The Doctor's strong arm was the only thing holding her upright now. Philippa leaned into the contact, seeking the warmth of another body while her own went into a tailspin of panic, and found the Doctor radiated heat right through her clothes. She sagged into the Doctor's arm, waiting for her heartbeat to calm, for her breathing to settle. She was alive, she told herself. She was here and present and alive. The knife was just a knife.
"Now that was just rude," the Doctor was saying, apparently to mid-air. "I know you had to work hard to get us out of that distortion, and yes, we're both very appreciative, but there's no need to make pointed statements about our guests, is there?" She turned to Philippa. "I'm sorry," she said. "The thing is, the TARDIS, she has this idea she's in charge of things. It's possible she's a teeny bit challenged by your… your captainyness."
"That is absurd," Philippa said.
The Doctor shrugged. "Absurdity is all part of the time and space experience, I'm afraid." They started walking again, and around the next corner, came across a low bench with a padded velvet seat.
"That's more like it," the Doctor said, approvingly, and helped Philippa to sit.
"Is that what my first officer is learning?" asked Philippa. "Absurdity?" Travelling through time in an armoured suit was, in itself, an absurd concept, but there were rumours. Starfleet was always dipping its toe into unorthodox propulsion methods, and she'd heard that the Klingons had certain methods of bending time.
"I've seen stranger methods of transport, but that was one of the more precarious," said the Doctor. "She must care about you very much, to have taken so many risks to sweep you away. It's smart, too: removing someone from the timestream at the point of death means that there's less distortion overall. Your personal timeline ended there."
Philippa sat with that fact for a few moments, letting the concept sink in. "When you say that my personal timeline ended there," she started, trying to find a polite way to ask if she was technically dead.
"Ah," said the Doctor, obviously realising the emotional impact of her words. "I always mean to explain that better, but honestly I'm not sure there's an easy way to say it."
"You were just having too much fun being clever and showing off your trinkets," Philippa snapped. She was exhausted, and the idea that she was also dead was proving very difficult to assimilate.
The Doctor rubbed a hand over Philippa's back, a point of warmth on her chilled skin. "Oh, Captain Georgiou, forgive me. I spoke without thinking. I get carried away sometimes, meeting new people, or seeing what new trick humans have taught themselves. I love you dearly, you know. Humans, I mean. I'm just not very good at telling the difference between facts that are interesting and facts that shatter. It's the same thing sometimes, and sometimes not."
"I need you to tell me now, Doctor: can I return to my time, to my ship?" It didn't matter: Philippa no longer had the patience or energy for having the truth delivered gently and in small mouthfuls.
The Doctor leaned her elbows on her knees, and her hair hung down around her face. It was evidently easier to deliver the difficult truths without making eye contact. "That seems unlikely, I'm afraid."
That settled it for Philippa. If she could not return to the Shenzhou, then she would move forward, to wherever Michael had landed. It only made sense that Michael had done something incredible and dangerous in order to save Philippa, of course she had. The fallout from such an action would be intense, and Michael would need a friend at her side.
She sat up straighter. "If I can't go back, then can I go forward? To where Michael is now?"
"Now that, I can do," said the Doctor, more cheerfully. "At least to the correct time period. It might not be the correct position in space, but it's a start."
Philippa stood up carefully, wary of dizziness or pain, then slowly straightened her spine. "Then if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to see how this ship is driven."
The Doctor laughed. "Sometimes I'm not sure who drives who: me or the TARDIS. Let's see what she's got in mind for us, shall we?"
Before she turned to follow the Doctor to whichever wondrous room served as the bridge aboard this TARDIS, Philippa reached around the corner to where the Klingon dagger was hung on the wall. She lifted it carefully from the bracket, and tucked it under her arm. Wherever she was going, she would need to be prepared. Michael Burnham was not the kind to land somewhere safe.